Thursday, May 18, 2017

Reading Friedell, Again

Egon Friedell's Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit ends with about thirty pages devoted to the few years between the end of WW I and the appearance of the book. These give the impression of bewilderment, for Einstein appears next to a metallurgical crank with a glacial theory of the development of galaxies; astrology gets a mention--the Age of Aquarius--and Freud is mentioned with considerable respect, Freudians or simply psychoanalysts with contempt. It strikes me as understandable that a man who had come to maturity before the war would find the world after it baffling.

I suppose that the measure of a cultural history comes down to three matters. There is plausibility: do the points on which one can judge make one confident in the author's account of the rest? Is there the sense of being in touch with a lively mind? And does one come away with a longer reading list to follow up? On all three, Friedell measures up. I don't know that I quite believe in Bismarck as he did, or that I know what to make of his account of Wagner. Here and there he reminds me of the exile in Pictures From an Institution who said that his ambition was to be unjust to Austria. But in the balance these quibbles, even if I were wholly correct in them, seem to me to count for little.

Will I read it again? No, probably not all the way through, for 1300 pages make a long way. Will I pull it off the shelves now and then to refresh my memory of his judgments on this or that figure--Bismarck, Goethe, Flaubert, Luther--or simply to to enjoy the salt with which he expresses them? Almost certainly.

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